The difference between fast food and cheap news.

To understand why your newsroom is the way it is, you have to understand why the burger place down the street is the way it is.

(I am posting this here so the next time someone asks, I can just give them the link instead of explaining it all over again.)

I don’t think a week goes by that someone somewhere doesn’t ask, “Why isn’t there any creativity in my newsroom? Why is everything so cut-and-dried and formulaic?”

Take a look at your favorite fast food restaurant. The process of producing and delivering the product is so carefully controlled, a machine could probably do it.

There is one way, and one way only, to make the giant-size burger. Employees have been taught (and may even have a chart to remind them) how many pickle, tomato and onion slices go on it, and even how they should be placed.

If you’ve ever peeked past the counter, you’ve probably seen little placards instructing employees exactly — “Welcome to BurgerBarn. Would you like to try our Big Barnyard Deluxe for only $2.99?” — how to greet customers, and what they should try to sell them.

As a result, you can drive through a BurgerBarn in Olympia, Washington, or a BurgerBarn in Ft. Myers, Florida, and the experience — not to mention the food — will be exactly the same.

There is more to this, I think, than consistency of product. By eliminating creativity and originality from the food preparation process, fast food establishments have turned cooking into unskilled, low-wage labor.

How is that different from TV news?

Well, I don’t think it’s any different at all.

Without knowing where you live, I can say with some confidence that last night, your local news began with a shot of both anchors sitting side-by-side on a set with a pictures of the city skyline and some monitors behind them.

One of them said something like, “Shocking new details about ______,” then turned to look at the other anchor, who picked up the story from there. The studio camera may have done a vertigo-inducing zoom to the second anchor as he or she finished the sentence, then tossed to a reporter who was Live! at the scene with an update.

It was the same almost everywhere last night, and it will be the same again tonight.

There’s no particular marketing advantage, as there is with fast food, to having two newscasts at opposite ends of the country almost exactly alike. But it implies a fairly significant economic advantage.

Just as it doesn’t take an experienced, highly-paid chef to follow the template at a BurgerBarn, it doesn’t take an experienced, highly-paid journalist to follow the template the consultant has written for the newsroom.

By making every newscast alike, and setting up guidelines that mandate story structure to almost word-for-word precision, stations and consultants have created a news product that anybody can assemble — with only a little more intellectual effort than is required to place pickles and tomatoes on a sesame seed bun.

If you aren’t in the business, you might be surprised how much of what you see is template-driven.

Those ‘spontaneous’ q&a sessions following stories are pretty obvious. “So… tell me… Jeff. How… dangerous… is… that… leaking gas line?” You’ve probably seen better acting at a high school play.

But did you notice in 1990 or thereabouts that the anchors on your local news began exclaiming, “Just take a look at this!” when introducing a particularly dramatic piece of footage?

That wasn’t spontaneous. It’s in the template handed down from the news designers, who realized that more and more viewers were mentally ‘tuning out’ their newscasts, even if they weren’t doing it physically.

(What that exclamation implies, of course, is, “Just take a look at this! It’s better than the other crap in this newscast, which we know you’ve been ignoring.”)

The median starting pay in TV news, according to a recent survey, is less than $20,000. According to a restaurant industry web site, entry-level fast food employees make more than that.

What does this mean if you’re in the business? I think it means that in the future, you’ll be working with fewer and fewer people with high-paying skills.

And if you’re a news consumer, it means you should probably start getting reacquainted with your morning paper.

(originally published by Michael Carpenter, republished with permission.)